Martin Luther King and Charles Darwin

I was asked the other day what race I considered myself a member of. I replied: Adam’s race.

That is, although I am of a pale complexion, I am not defined by my skin color. Rather, I belong to that very inclusive race of human beings – a group that includes every one of us, as a matter of fact – who are descendants of Adam and Eve.

I’m reminded of this in the aftermath of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s recent ill-considered words, in which he commented on President Obama’s speaking voice. I’m also reminded of my racial heritage (that is, Adam’s race) as we look forward to celebrating on Monday the great achievement of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

A lot has been said over the years about race relations in this nation, often in an attempt to better understand how to achieve a colorblind society, one without prejudice based on skin color.

But consider this. The best way to understand that there is no room for racism in American society is to understand human beings from a creationist point of view. That is, to take the biblical account of man’s origins seriously, and literally.

A Darwinian explanation of man, by contrast, may be more popular in the courts, in public schools and among NPR reporters. But philosophically – it is a Darwinian worldview that allows racism to exist, while a biblical perspective does not.

To be fair, most modern-day evolutionists are not racists, obviously. (This wasn’t always true in the past, however. The Nazis and other groups that acted on their “theories” of racial superiority based their abhorrent philosophies on what they perceived as applied Darwinism -- i.e. survival of the fittest among competing races.) And surely, people expressed racist attitudes before Darwin.

And to be fair, some people in the past have misused the biblical text to support their own racist views. But those people not only prostituted the text; they also missed the entire point of the text, which clearly paints a picture of human beings antithetical to any notions of racial superiority.

So yes, the vast majority of modern Americans who believe in evolution, or creationism, are not racists. That is a good thing, it goes without saying, as Americans have worked hard to both accept and empathize with those of different backgrounds.

But there are reasons why a Darwinian perspective has room for racism, while a biblical perspective utterly excludes any racist attitudes. It’s all in the underpinnings, the philosophical building blocks, as it were, of the two competing world views.

From a biblical perspective, we’re all God’s creation. Every human being is made in the image of God. Every human being has the divine spark, whatever his or her physical appearance.

Even the concept of race, of categorizing people according to race, has no basis in the biblical text. Biblical genealogies list families of nations – Egyptians, Greeks or Persians, for example. But the modern divisions of race – black, white, etc. – is absent from the biblical text.

In my view, the silence of the text tells us something – namely, that from the divine point of view, race isn’t really that important. God, I think, doesn’t really look at people in racial terms.

The biblical account also describes every one of Adam’s descendants as fallen – with nobody fallen any farther than anybody else. The text is utterly straightforward, and without exceptions: “In Adam all sinned.”

With everybody equally made in the image of God and everybody equally a “sinner” (to use that old-fashioned but very descriptive word), there is no room for “racial” one-upmanship.

Contrast that to the philosophical underpinnings of Darwinism. Our first hint comes from the sub-title of Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” which reads, “On the Preservation of Favored Races.”

The sub-title, surely embarrassing to modern-day evolutionists, is routinely excluded from information given to high school students. But that is how Charles Darwin thought, and it is entirely consistent with the Darwinist point of view.

Specifically, if human beings are mere accidents, evolving much as other animals, who can disagree with someone who claims that one population, all of one color, has not evolved as much as another group, of a different color? After all, it is consistent under this line of reasoning that isolated groups of animals “evolve” at different rates, producing “superior” and “inferior” groups of animals.

But back to a biblical viewpoint. If my neighbor is created in the image of God, I may suspect that God has a vested interest in how I treat him. So I’m going to be a little careful about how I behave toward that neighbor.

But from a Darwinian perspective, there is none of the “nonsense” of seeing every human being stamped in the image of God. If someone of a different “race” is merely a competing animal of a different skin color, most of the restraints produced by a fear of his divine sponsor disappear.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously looked forward to the time when we would consider each man by the content of his character rather than the color of his skin.

Indeed, the biblical text stresses looking at each man’s character. God looks on the inside, it says, while man looks on outward appearance. Let’s keep a biblical perspective on race relations, especially as we celebrate this week.